Concept You may have come across a term multi-tiered storage. This means, that the storage solution has multiple arrays, fast and expensive and slow but cheap. Files accessed very frequently are stored on very fast SSD disks, files accessed less frequently are stored on the much cheaper but much slower spinning disks. Files designated for long term archive are often stored on magnetic tapes. Most enterprise storage solutions can handle the first two tiers automatically and some can also offload to tapes on a schedule. Azure offers similarly tiered storage: Hot, Cold and Archive. The Archive tier is very cheap (and yes, also very slow) storage designed for long term retention. Azure Storage Account allows changing the tier for existing, individual files. The current tier can be seen in the Azure Storage Explorer: The idea is that we can move existing files, in the existing Storage Account to the archive tier, or upload files as we normally would to an existing account and can then mark them for archiving. This process is completely manual but with the help of PowerShell can be easily automated. Microsoft does not reveal how the archive storage works and what exactly sure happens behind the … Continue reading Move data to Azure Archive Storage using PowerShell